Conservatives have campaigned and governed with no regard for democracy

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

With the specter of the Parliamentary Budget Officer taking the Clerk of the Privy Council to court, a momentous question looms over our public affairs: will the Harper government answer a single legitimate question about its conduct of Canada’s public business?

Or is the government’s message that we can all go pleasure ourselves until 2015?

Judging from the news on multiple fronts, there’s auto-gratification in everyone’s near-term future. Canada has fallen down the rabbit hole of an upside down universe. Bill C-38 has been called everything from a Trojan Horse to a coup. The government thinks of it as politics as usual. Describe it as you will, here’s the bottom line: it has nothing to do with democracy.

Like fake lakes, fake F-35s and fake civil servants, it is nothing but the simulacrum of a reality only marketers could love. The sole information this government puts out, disingenuously referred to as “messaging”, is 100 proof advertorial — and very often a pack of lies.

As everybody knows, the vast majority of C-38 has nothing to do with the finances of the country. That makes it a legislative stealth attack, a fraud upon the democratic system. Yet those in the indentured press are already rhapsodizing about the PM’s political acuity. For passing C-38? That’s like praising a firing squad for getting the job done — after all, the target is blindfolded, tied down, and unarmed.

Yes, the PM managed to stuff into one bogus piece of legislation 40 per cent of the annual legislative output of Parliament. A couple of force feedings like that and the House of Commons will only need to meet four weeks a year. It could be called Democracy Month, synchronized with the Tulip Festival and offered to tourists as an Ottawa novelty.

Why are Harper’s enablers, some of them sitting on the editorial board of my beloved Globe and Mail, so untroubled by the fact that the PM has his boot on the neck of Canadian democracy? The paper did stellar work on the Ad Sponsorship scandal. Dick Doyle would have expected no less.

But so far, it has disgraced itself on the Del Mastro file, something that the iconic editor, though a Conservative, would have found appalling. The Globe has also hitched up its hemline an inch or two and scurried away to avoid most of the inconvenient mud of Harper’s other contretemps.

Is this what happens when the Report on Business rules the editorial roost?

Has editorial board policy scaled the newsroom walls on Front Street as the Publisher’s Office once did in the days of Roy Megarry and Norman Webster? Is the Globe’s zeal for a Biznocracy in Canada so keen that it now believes, along with the government, that the end justifies the means?

With the anniversary of Watergate upon us, it is time for a little soul searching at the Grey Lady. My advice? Send a few marquee columnists into official government service and hire Maher, McGregor, Ditchburn and Naumetz. No doilies behind those heads.

Never has the need been greater for clarity about what is happening in our public life. Having co-opted Parliament, the national police force, and segments of the media, not to mention all the cranial space in the collective head of its own backbench, the Harper government has now come for the Public Service.

The Clerk of the Privy Council has told the Parliamentary Budget Office that, no, it isn’t going to get essential financial information about the government’s budget cuts. This is not King Stephen talking (Professor Ned Franks of Queen’s University coinage), but the top-dog of the public service in the person of Wayne Wouters.

Kevin Page implored Wouters not to send the PBO a letter signed by the Clerk denying information that Page believes is indispensable if MPs are to fulfill their public duties. In fact, Page has concluded that it is “unconstitutional” to suppress this information.

The irony of his battle with the Clerk? Page was actually trying to do Wouters, a fellow alumnus of Queen’s, a favor. He knew that once the Clerk signed that letter, the Public Service of Canada, not just an authoritarian pack of temporary politicians, would now be telling Canadians to go pleasure themselves.

That is a Rubicon no public servant should want to cross, at least not one who believes in an independent and professional civil service. Giving the government what it wants is in many ways the Clerk’s duty but giving it up on request should never be part of the job description.

On the other side of that Rubicon is a very familiar destination these days – the courts. The Americans have Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: the Canadian knock-off is Mr. Harper Goes to Court. Canadian democracy is not practiced these days, it is litigated. Attiwapiskat, the Wheat Board, the Afghan files, the In-and Out-scam, veteran Sean Bruyea, and immigration backlogs – all went the legal route one way or the other.

With the exception of Attiwapiskat, the government mostly lost when it didn’t make face-saving plea bargains or out-of-court settlements. Now, armed with a legal opinion that says government agencies that don’t hand over financial information to the PBO are in violation of the Parliament of Canada Act, Page may yet face off against the PCO in federal court. Despite the legal opinion, he has been blown off by the Harper government. Is anyone surprised?

Yes, we are all Borys Wrzesnewskyj now. If you want to claim your rights these days in Canada, you’d better be prepared to lawyer up. In that regard, no court case is more momentous than the one of the defeated Liberal incumbent in Etobicoke-Centre, where the election result has been declared null and void and is now under appeal. Depending on what happens on July 10 at the Supreme Court, this case could change our political universe.

Etobicoke-Centre has always been a place where elections are fought along the lines of a floor-hockey game at Kingston Pen – organized mayhem where depleted electrolytes are replenished by home-brew. In 2004, the Conservative campaign fell apart in the end. In fact, the last PC riding association president for Etobicoke-Centre actually endorsed Borys the Baker.

It was a turn of events for which there would be a pay-day when Stephen Harper united the right and assumed the party leadership. Bear in mind, Harper grew up in Etobicoke-Centre and went to school at Richview Collegiate. As Borys himself puts it, “It was annoying to him that I held the seat. In one of the campaigns, he visited the riding three times. There was even talk of my opponent being cabinet material.”

The dirty politics got dirtier. Borys was surrounded by Tory thugs coming out of a public debate and taken to task on his stand over same-sex marriage. “Are you a fag?” he was asked. Disgusting flyers were tucked under the windshield-wipers of cars in church parking lots. Two thousand of his lawn signs were vandalized and had to be replaced. Swastikas began showing up on his material, a not inconsequential tactic in a riding where there were so many families whose parents had fled the Nazis.

Borys began to notice that bad things happened to his campaigns just before voting day. In 2008, on the Thanksgiving Day long weekend, he went to canvas three apartment buildings near Eglington Avenue. His practice was to work his way down from the top floor. He didn’t get far from the top floor before realizing that something was terribly wrong. People opened the door just a crack and stared at him silently. Finally one lady said, “You’re such a fraud.”

The building had been flooded with handouts by the Conservatives that looked like a compilation of actual newspaper stories. Though fake, the theme they retailed was deadly: Borys was missing in action in Ottawa and rarely attended committee meetings. He pulled his canvas teams and regrouped.

“They gave one example where they said I only attended 2 out of 49 meetings. I wasn’t actually even on that committee but had gone as a proxy a few times for someone who couldn’t attend. Then they made up a committee that didn’t even exist. As for the committee I was actually on, public accounts, they offered no information.”

The dirty tricks fit a pattern. They came at the end of campaigns, including a weekend-before-the vote Conservative mailer to key polls taking Borys to task for defending the human and civil rights of Karla Homolka. His office was inundated with calls and there was barely time for his campaign to piece together a response.

So it was not surprising in May, 2011 that Borys felt uneasy. “I kept warning my campaign manager that something was going to come down the pike.” Then Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research showed up – Nick of Mount Royal. Then the Twitter line went out – bye-bye Ignatieff, bye-bye Borys. Still nothing happened – until election day. And then enough happened at polling stations to later persuade an Ontario Superior Court judge to throw out the results of the general election in Etobicoke-Centre in a race that was “won” by only 26 votes. The judge found that 79 voters were not properly registered or cleared to cast a ballot.

It is worth noting that the judge’s rare ruling would never have been made if it had been left up to officials in the Liberal Party. They tried to discourage Borys from fighting the irregularities that came to his attention on voting night. Instead of listening to his party’s legal counsel, Borys channeled his grandmother.

When she was alive, she ran a bakery that featured a 60-meter wooden fence facing the road. One day, an aspiring Conservative politician named John Yaremko showed up and asked if he could put one of his posters on the fence. She invited him to put them from one end of it to the other. Vandals came in the night and knocked the fence down to send a message to the “DP” who had the effrontery to be running for the Ontario legislature.

When Yaremko learned about it, he came to the bakery and offered to raise the fence and take away his signs. Instead, Borys’s grandmother insisted the fence – with all the posters – stay down for the entire election. She wanted people to see the handiwork of bigotry. She thought they would reject it. And that’s why John Yaremko, who won the election and went on to become Ontario’s citizenship minister, took Borys’s grandmother flowers regularly for the rest of her life.

And that’s also why Borys has spent a quarter of a million dollars he will never recover on fighting what he saw in Etobicoke-Centre on election night in 2011. No one thought he would, from the Conservative party machine linked to the irregularities by sworn affidavits filed with the courts, to Elections Canada that presided over the flawed process.

Here is something to keep in mind. Borys’s court case focused on just 10 of 224 polls. So just how many other improperly registered votes got into the ballot box that night? How did they get there? Robogate has focused on subtraction or voter suppression – votes that never made it to the ballot box. But what if there was voter addition – votes that got there the same way that stuffing gets into a turkey?

And what if Etobicoke-Centre wasn’t an isolated incident? There is a locked Elections Canada facility in Ottawa where the evidence sits. For every poll in every riding the total ballots have to match the crossed out names on voters lists and the registration certificates.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.